2015-12-30

We believe in a compressible Universe

"Believe" is often associated with religion. However, even for using the "scientific method", we are forced to assume certain qualities of the Universe that we cannot prove nor fully verify. The most basic assumption is that there are common laws that are universal and they function the same across the whole Universe. This is a leap of faith that we have to take if we believe that the Universe can be understood at all by humans.

Another way to say it is that the Universe is informational compressible, at least on the time dimension. This is the classical assumption that knowing the initial state of the system you can predict the evolution of the system based on the physical laws (except some quantum effects maybe).

We already know that any finite complexity can be generated by a ridiculous simple set of rules. Thus, it is conceivable to assume that the Universe emerged from a "big bang" following a simple set of rules, like the known and yet undiscovered laws of physics. This, however, brings the possibility that the Universe have a certain built in redundancy that makes it... compressible in the information theory sense.

But even if the Universe is not informational compressible regarding space, all we can know about the Universe is just a tiny (an maybe lossy) compression of the incredible complexity in the known Universe. So one of the following possibilities must be true: either we can not understand the Universe, either the things we can understand are very informational compressible, so we can represent them in our limited physical brain.

Another, even wilder, possibility is this: what we know about Universe is just a meta-information that works only in the context of the existing information in the Universe.